Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/98

 92 my steps to its door. This church worships in a chapel of the old Church of San Francisco. You pass through a garden full of beautiful shrubs and flowers in full bloom and leaf, making the courts of the house of the Lord fragrant with these lovely creations of the Lord. This garden is about thirty feet wide by a hundred long. Our Lord lay in a garden of like sweets. Here he dwells to-day. And as we pass through we breathe that beautiful thought, from one whose pen we hope again to see serving the Lord:

 And as Thy rocky tomb Was in a garden fair, Where round about stood flowers in bloom, To sweeten all the air,

So in my heart of stone I sepulchre Thy death, While thoughts of Thee, like, roses' bloom, Bring sweetness in their breath."

The chapel we enter on the side near its lower end. It is high arched, prettily frescoed about the altar, and is seated with chairs for about four hundred. It is nearly full. The worshipers are chiefly native, not over ten or fifteen Americans being present. They are dressed mostly with some attempt at cleanliness, their garb of the week being changed for the Sabbath. A few are in the soiled clothes of their daily toil. They are dark-colored, Indian in whole or largely, and all sit as promiscuously as they ought to do in more enlightened congregations. They are singing "lustily." John Wesley would have declared that they kept that word in his Discipline. They all sing, and sing with all their might. I never heard camp-meeting excel them in this heartiness and gusto. The words were simple and sweet, and the tunes likewise. None of them were familiar till the last one, in which I detected an air I had known, and, after a little, found it was," I'm a pilgrim, I'm a stranger." I give you a verse of this. You can all sing it, and will find it not difficult to translate. It begins, "I am going to heaven—I am a wanderer—to live eternally with Jesus:"